Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan military commander during Afghan-Soviet war and later on in the civil war afterwards. He was an ethnic Tajik and a Sunni muslim. During the civil war, he defended the capital from the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Abdul Rashid Dostum.

After the Taliban came to power in 1996, Massoud returned to armed opposition. Mssoud rejected the Talibans radical interpretation of Islam. He became the leader of the Northern Alliance which allied with NATO during the war against the Taliban. He was assassinated on September 9, 2001, two days before the September 9/11 attacks in the US.